William E. Connolly

Religion's influence in American politics is obvious in recent debates about school prayer, abortion, and homosexuality, as well as in the success of grassroots religious organizations in mobilizing voters. Many liberal secularists decry this trend, rejecting any interaction between politics and religion. But in Why I Am Not a Secularist, distinguished political theorist William E. Connolly argues that secularism, although admirable in its pursuit of freedom and diversity, too often undercuts these goals through its narrow and intolerant understandings of public reason. In response, he crafts a new model of public life that more accurately reflects the needs of contemporary politics. Connolly first shows how the secular division between public and private life conceals the vital role of "the visceral register" in public life itself. Then, while elaborating an ethos of engagement that appreciates this element, he examines capital punishment, the War on Drugs, the liberal idea of the nation, the public role of atheism, and the right to die. The traditional formulations of secularism, Connolly contends, underestimate the vitality and complexity of real-life political judgments. At its best, secularism remains immodest in its claim to provide the authoritative basis for public reason; at its worst, it overlooks possibilities for selective collaboration between religious and nonreligious perspectives in politics. To correct these limitations, Connolly advances a bold new vision of public diversity that acknowledges questions about its own ideology, incorporates a wider variety of ethical views, and honors the desire of believers and nonbelievers alike to represent their faithsopenly in the civic forum. Throughout this provocative volume, Connolly presents convincing evidence of the need to refashion secularism to foster a more responsive public life and a more generous political culture. William E. Connolly is professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of numerous books including The Terms of Political Discourse (1983; winner of the 1999 Lippincott Award from the American Political Science Association), Identity\Difference (1991), and The Ethos of Pluralization (Minnesota, 1995).

Over the past two decades, the renowned political theorist William E. Connolly has developed a powerful theory of pluralism as the basis of a territorial politics. In this concise volume, Connolly launches a new defense of pluralism, contending that it has a renewed relevance in light of pressing global and national concerns, including the war in Iraq, the movement for a Palestinian state, and the fight for gay and lesbian rights. Connolly contends that deep, multidimensional pluralism is the best way to promote justice and inclusion without violence. He advocates a deep pluralism—in contrast to shallow, secular pluralism—that helps to create space for different groups to bring their religious faiths into the public realm. This form of deep pluralism extends far beyond faith, encompassing multiple dimensions of social and personal lives, including household organization and sexuality. Connolly looks at pluralism not only in light of faith but also in relation to evil, ethics, relativism, globalization, and sovereignty. In the process, he engages many writers and theorists—among them, Spinoza, William James, Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Talal Asad, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Pluralism is the first book in which Connolly explains the relationship between pluralism and the experience of time, and he offers readings of several films that address how time is understood, including Time Code , Far from Heaven , Waking Life , and The Maltese Falcon . In this necessary book Connolly brings a compelling, accessible philosophical critique together with his personal commitment to an inclusive political agenda to suggest how we might—and why we must—cultivate pluralism within both society and ourselves.

In The Fragility of Things , eminent theorist William E. Connolly focuses on several self-organizing ecologies that help to constitute our world. These interacting geological, biological, and climate systems, some of which harbor creative capacities, are depreciated by that brand of neoliberalism that confines self-organization to economic markets and equates the latter with impersonal rationality. Neoliberal practice thus fails to address the fragilities it exacerbates. Engaging a diverse range of thinkers, from Friedrich Hayek, Michel Foucault, Hesiod, and Immanuel Kant to Voltaire, Terrence Deacon, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Alfred North Whitehead, Connolly brings the sense of fragility alive as he rethinks the idea of freedom. Urging the Left not to abandon the state but to reclaim it, he also explores scales of politics below and beyond the state. The contemporary response to fragility requires a militant pluralist assemblage composed of those sharing affinities of spirituality across differences of creed, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.

By taking up recent research in neuroscience to explore the way brain activity is influenced by cultural conditions and stimuli such as film technique, Connolly is able to fashion a new perspective on our attempts to negotiate--and thrive--within a deeply pluralized society whose culture and economy continue to quicken. In Neuropolitics, Connolly draws upon recent brain/body research to explore the creative potential of thinking, the layered character of culture, the cultivation of ethical sensibilities, and the critical role of technique in all three. He then shows how a series of films -- including Vertigo, Five Easy Pieces, and Citizen Kane -- enhances our appreciation of technique and contests the linear image of time now prevalent in cultural theory.Connolly deftly brings these themes together to support an ethos of deep pluralism within the democratic state and a politics of citizen activism across states. His book is an original and rigorous study that attends to the creative possibilities of thinking in identity, culture, and ethics."Who else but Connolly could make brain research and film interpretation illuminate each other in this way? It’s a splendid set of moves and makes this book comparable to no other, not only in political theory, but in cultural theory, film studies, and psychology."— Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley

In A World of Becoming William E. Connolly outlines a political philosophy suited to a world whose powers of creative evolution include and exceed the human estate. This is a world composed of multiple interacting systems, including those of climate change, biological evolution, economic practices, and geological formations. Such open systems, set on different temporal registers of stability and instability, periodically resonate together to produce profound, unpredictable changes. To engage such a world reflectively is to feel pressure to alter established practices of politics, ethics, and spirituality. In pursuing such a course, Connolly draws inspiration from philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze, as well as the complexity theorist of biology Stuart Kauffman and the theologian Catherine Keller. Attunement to a world of becoming, Connolly argues, may help us address dangerous resonances between global finance capital, cross-regional religious resentments, neoconservative ideology, and the 24-hour mass media. Coming to terms with subliminal changes in the contemporary experience of time that challenge traditional images can help us grasp how these movements have arisen and perhaps even inspire creative counter-movements. The book closes with the chapter “The Theorist and the Seer,” in which Connolly draws insights from early Greek ideas of the Seer and a Jerry Lewis film, The Nutty Professor , to inform the theory enterprise today.

Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is William E. Connolly’s stirring call for the democratic left to counter the conservative stranglehold over American religious and economic culture in order to put egalitarianism and ecological integrity on the political agenda. An eminent political theorist known for his work on identity, secularism, and pluralism, Connolly charts the path of the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine,” source of a bellicose ethos reverberating through contemporary institutional life. He argues that the vengeful vision of the Second Coming motivating a segment of the evangelical right resonates with the ethos of greed animating the cowboy sector of American capitalism. The resulting evangelical-capitalist ethos finds expression in church pulpits, Fox News reports, the best-selling Left Behind novels, consumption practices, investment priorities, and state policies. These practices resonate together to diminish diversity, forestall responsibility to future generations, ignore urban poverty, and support a system of extensive economic inequality. Connolly describes how the evangelical-capitalist machine works, how its themes resound across class lines, and how it infiltrates numerous aspects of American life. Proposing changes in sensibility and strategy to challenge this machine, Connolly contends that the liberal distinction between secular public and religious private life must be reworked. Traditional notions of unity or solidarity must be translated into drives to forge provisional assemblages comprised of multiple constituencies and creeds. The left must also learn from the political right how power is infused into everyday institutions such as the media, schools, churches, consumption practices, corporations, and neighborhoods. Connolly explores the potential of a “tragic vision” to contest the current politics of existential resentment and political hubris, explores potential lines of connection between it and theistic faiths that break with the evangelical right, and charts the possibility of forging an “eco-egalitarian” economy. Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is William E. Connolly’s most urgent work to date.

244 pages Cornell University Press; 1 edition (April 1, 1991) English 0801425069 978-0801425066 Product 0.8 x 6.2 x 9.5 inches

Coming to terms with a new period of uncertainty when it is still replete with possibilitiesThis quick and engaging study clearly lays out the United States’ current democratic crisis. Examining the early stages of the Nazi movement in Germany, William E. Connolly detects synergies with Donald Trump’s rhetorical style. Tapping into a sense of contemporary fragility, Aspirational Fascism pays particular attention to how conflicts between neoliberalism and the pluralizing left have placed the white working class in a bind. Ultimately, Connolly believes a multifaceted democracy constitutes the best antidote to aspirational fascism and rethinks what a politics of the left might look like today.Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

In Facing the Planetary William E. Connolly expands his influential work on the politics of pluralization, capitalism, fragility, and secularism to address the complexities of climate change and to complicate notions of the Anthropocene. Focusing on planetary processes—including the ocean conveyor, glacier flows, tectonic plates, and species evolution—he combines a critical understanding of capitalism with an appreciation of how such nonhuman systems periodically change on their own. Drawing upon scientists and intellectuals such as Lynn Margulis, Michael Benton, Alfred North Whitehead, Anna Tsing, Mahatma Gandhi, Wangari Maathai, Pope Francis, Bruno Latour, and Naomi Klein, Connolly focuses on the gap between those regions creating the most climate change and those suffering most from it. He addresses the creative potential of a "politics of swarming" by which people in different regions and social positions coalesce to reshape dominant priorities. He also explores how those displaying spiritual affinities across differences in creed can energize a militant assemblage that is already underway.

How plural, really, is pluralism today? In this book a prominent political theorist reworks the traditional pluralist imagination, rendering it more inclusive and responsive to new drives to pluralization."Connolly’s latest tour de force challenges contemporary pluralism to forsake its conservative past and move in the direction of a more dynamic and expansive democratic project. The Ethos of Pluralization offers a trenchant critique of the most rigid of contemporary political postures and moves us all to consider what it might mean, radically, to live democratically. Passionate and persuasive, this text analyzes and enacts the encounter with difference in a specifically political sense. A brilliant and urgent book." — Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley

Modernity is marked by acrimonious debate over the form of the good society and the proper shape of politics. But these struggles are set within a frame that supports some arguments and rules other possibilities out of contention. If late-modernity is a time of danger as well as significant achievement, it is necessary to ask: how can we become more reflective about the economies of thought that have governed modern political discourse? William Connolly clarifies the affinities binding together disparate theorists who have sought to comprehend the shape and prospects of modernity. He reveals how thinkers adamantly opposed to one another at one level implicitly share assumptions and demands at a more basic level; and invites Nietzsche - the thinker who disturbs modern theories by assessing them from the hypothetical perspective of a non-modern future - to expose patterns of insistence inside the theories of his predecessors.

William Connolly presents a lucid and concise defense of the thesis of "essentially contested concepts" that can well be read as a general introduction to political theory, as well as for its challenge to the prevailing understanding of political discourse. In Connolly's view, the language of politics is not a neutral medium that conveys ideas independently formed but an institutionalized structure of meanings that channels political thought and action in certain directions. In the new preface he pursues the implications of this perspective for a distinctive conception of ethics and democracy.

In this new installation of his work, William E. Connolly examines entanglements between volatile earth processes and emerging cultural practices, highlighting relays among extractive capitalism, self-amplifying climate processes, migrations, democratic aspirations, and fascist dangers. In three interwoven essays, Connolly takes up thinkers in the "minor tradition" of European thought who, unlike Cartesians and Kantians, cross divisions between nature and culture. He first offers readings of Sophocles and Mary Shelley, asking whether close attention to the Anthropocene could perhaps have arrived earlier had subsequent humanists absorbed their lessons. He then joins Deleuze and Guattari's notion of an abstract machine with contemporary earth sciences, doing so to compare the Antique Little Ice Age of the late Roman empire to contemporary relays between extractive capitalism and accelerating climate processes. The final essay stages a dramatic dialogue between Alfred North Whitehead and Michel Foucault about the pursuit of truth during a time of planetary turbulence. With Climate Machines Fascist Drives, and Truth , Connolly forges incisive interventions into key issues of our time.

An entirely new interpretation of one of the most seminal and widely read figures in the history of political thought, The Augustinian Imperative is also 'an archaeological investigation into the intellectual foundation of liberal societies.' Drawing support from Nietzsche and Foucault, Connolly argues that the Augustinian Imperative contains unethical its carriers too often convert living signs that threaten their ontological self-confidence into modes of otherness to be condemned, punished, or converted in order to restore that confidence. With a lucidity and rhetorical power that makes it readily accessible, The Augustinian Imperative examines Augustine's enactment of the Imperative, explores alternative ethico-political orientations, and subsequently reveals much about the politics of morality in the modern age.

In a series of stimulating essays, William E. Connolly explores the element of ambiguity in politics. He argues that democratic politics in a modern society requires, if it is to flourish, an appreciation of the ambiguous character of the standards and principles we cherish the most. Connolly’s work, lucidly, presented and intellectually challenging, will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, philosophy, rhetoric, and law, and to all whose interests include the connections between contemporary epistemological arguments and politics and, more broadly, between thought and language.

Professor David Kettler commented at the time of initial release, that this book is "writing with great poise and clarity, the author says important things in a deceptively simple way about a problem of paramount significance. A fine piece of clarification, blending just the right mixture of respect and impiety toward the important heroes of contemporary political science, this is the kind of book I look forward to having available for our courses in political theory."Ideology, though long pronounced moribund, continues to play a central role in contemporary political inquiry. In this reevaluation of the true function of political science, the author lays down guidelines for the construction of fruitful political interpretations in the large areas where ideological assumptions and claims cannot be adequately tested. He analyzes two representative theories of power in American society-those of the "pluralists" who affirm and the "elitists" who dispute the case for democracy-and demonstrates how personal preferences and group-oriented interests enter into the development of these concepts. Speaking to all social scientists and students engaged in the study of political processes, Connolly details the methods by which the investigator-who inevitably brings his own beliefs and values to the task-can lay bare and control the ideological aspects of his own work and that of others.A critical examination of the writings of some of the leading figures in recent and contemporary political inquiry, such as Karl Mannheim, C. Wright Mills, Robert Dahl, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset leads him to assign a decisive role for the political scientist in the creation of carefully formulated ideologies. An original mind, drawing upon an exceptionally rich store of knowledge, has here produced an important book which will be of immediate-and challenging-relevance to the work and studies of all scholars, graduate students, and majors in the field of government and to all concerned with fundamental problems in social science.William E. Connolly was Professor of Political Science at Ohio University. He has held a Horace Rackham Graduate Fellowship and has taught at the University of Michigan, where he received his undergraduate and graduate training in political and social science. He is currently Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at John Hopkins University.

Composed as a counter-history of western philosophical and political thought, Stormy Weather explores the role western cosmologies have played in the conquests of paganism in Europe and the Americas, the production of climate wreckage, and the concealment of that wreckage from western humanists and earth scientists until late in the day. A lived cosmology, Connolly says, contains embedded understandings about the beginnings of the earth and the way time unfolds. The text engages the major western cosmologies of Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Tocqueville, together with pagan and minor western orientations that posed challenges to them or could have. Hesiod, Ovid, William Apess, Amazonian and Aztec cosmologies, Catherine Keller’s minor Christianity, James Baldwin, and Michel Serres instigate key responses, often challenging binary logics and the subject/object dichotomy with a world of multiple human and nonhuman subjectivities. Connolly pursues a conception of time as a multiplicity of intersecting temporalities to come to terms with the vicissitudes of climate destruction and the grandeur of an earth neither highly susceptible to mastery nor designed to harmonize smoothly with humans. The book revisits the “improbable necessity” of a politics of swarming to respond to the ongoing wreckage and potential fascist responses to vast infusions of climate refugees from the south into temperate-zone capitalist states. Stormy Weather draws on the work of earth scientists, indigenous thinkers, naturalists, humanists, and students of nonwestern cosmologies. Ultimately, Connolly contends that critical intellectuals today must not remain enclosed in disciplinary silos, or even in “the humanities” as currently defined, to do justice to our moment of climate wreckage.

Social Structure and Political William E. Social Structure and Political D.C. Heath and Company FIRST First Edition, First Printing. Published by D.C. Heath and Company, 1974. Octavo. Paperback. Book is very good with shelf wear and scrape on front cover. 100% positive feedback. 30 day money back guarantee. NEXT DAY SHIPPING! Excellent customer service. Please email with any questions. All books packed carefully and ship with free delivery confirmation/tracking. All books come with free bookmarks. Ships from Sag Harbor, New York.Seller 320956 Essays We Buy Books! Collections - Libraries - Estates - Individual Titles. Message us if you have books to sell!

«Frente a lo planetario» es un libro fundamental sobre uno de los más acuciantes del el cambio climático. El autor pone el foco en el “proceso de lo planetario” –incluyendo el estado de los océanos, el derretimiento de los glaciares, las placas tectónicas y la evolución de las especies– y plantea una mirada crítica de las formas de vida contemporáneas y una recuperación del lugar de los no-humanos que habitan en la Tierra de la mano de autores como Lynn Margulis, Alfred North Whitehead, Mahatma Gandhi, Naomi Klein, el papa Francisco y Bruno Latour. Pero además de realizar una fuerte crítica al estado del tiempo contemporáneo, Frente a lo planetario, apuesta por una “política del enjambre” con la que personas de distinta cultura, clase social, credo y de diversas regiones del mundo puedan aliarse para reponer las verdaderas prioridades de un planeta en alerta máxima. Una crisis que demanda cooperación y acción, una asamblea militante espiritual pedirá Connolly, para evitar el colapso y el fin de la vida humana.